Shoot Many Robots looks promising, but the news that Ubisoft is publishing the …

Shoot Many Robots is a promising side-scrolling shooter, and a title we have been keeping an eye on. The game is scheduled to be released on the 360, PS3, and PC as a digital download, and it was just announced that it will be published by Ubisoft. This is not good news for those of us hoping to play the game on the PC. In fact, I tweeted something along those lines yesterday, which rankled Demiurge Studio's Albert Reed.

Ubisoft seems to be openly antagonistic towards PC gaming these days, with last-minute delays hitting a number of big-name titles, and chokingly bad DRM forcing you to activate the game every time it's launched. The last victim was From Dust, a game that suffered all these issues, not to mention a lazy port. To make matters worse, Ubisoft mislead gamers about the nature of the DRM included with the game. It has now been announced the activation requirement will be patched out of the game, which makes sense: a working crack hit the Internet almost as soon as the game was released.

So here we are, with a game being published by a company with a terrible track record for PC releases, and a developer promising us the PC version will be up to snuff. We'll be sure to check back when the game is released in 2012.

Ben's got the right idea,though if someone is lucky,he can get a nice cheap HDTV hooked up to the PC too...Or you can go my way and just build a FrankenHTPC and alternate between a 3 monitor Eyefinity rig and a 52'' HDTV (Btw, 24 cores and 256Gig RAM is relatively future-proof,right?)

Ben's got the right idea,though if someone is lucky,he can get a nice cheap HDTV hooked up to the PC too...Or you can go my way and just build a FrankenHTPC and alternate between a 3 monitor Eyefinity rig and a 52'' HDTV (Btw, 24 cores and 256Gig RAM is relatively future-proof,right?)

what motherboard do you use that gives you 24cores and 256 gigs of RAM? or are you saying that's what you want?

I agree. For the twitchy mouse and keyboard first person shooters, MMORPGs, and RTS games the PC makes some sense as a primary development platform. For almost everything else, the overwhelming majority of copies sold on consoles vs PC makes even having a PC version a bit of an afterthought.

Oh, so the PC is just better for FPS, RTS, and MMORPGs? That leaves the consoles good for... uh... side scrollers and sports games? I think maybe I'll sit the console revolution out.

There is no doubt that console's do more business these days. The hardware, while laughably inferior to a modern PC rig, is cheap. You can score a tidy pile of crash pawning off terrible casual family games to people who would normally be afraid to be near a computer. If you are a game company, you should be dumping money into console sales to score some quick cash. Thankfully, knowing that I am missing out on Wii Sport really isn't causing me lost sleep.

That still doesn't change the fact that if you want to play the best and most bad ass games, the PC is still the king. Watching someone fawn over Halo... a frankly lack luster game, pretty much sums of the console Vs PC battle for me. Halo never made it big on the PC. They did port it over, but no one cared. Why? It just wasn't a good game. For the average PC user, Halo was nothing new. It featured the same a gimped version of multiplayer modes that PCs have had for a couple of decades, game play mechanics pioneered in the 90's, and laughably bland and dated graphics.

The real complaint that PC users have had against consoles isn't that they exist, it is that consoles drag down the entire state of gaming. You go from Battlefield 2 to complete shit like Battlefield: Bad Company 2, which is just a completely lobotomized version of the original BF2 with only slightly improved graphics. To take a half a decade old game and make it smaller, shittier, and more basic just so that someone with a gimped console controller stands half a chance of accidentally lining up his auto-aim gun on another player is infuriating.

Thankful, despite PC gaming getting deluged with shoddy console games, consoles still don't offer up anything exclusive worth wanting. Anything worth releasing is released on the PC (along with piles of crap that isn't). When done right, those games are almost inevitably better than their console brethren in every way possible.

I'll declare consoles the winner when something original and interesting gets released for the consoles worth playing that isn't ported over or simultaneously released on PCs. Otherwise, consoles might be the bigger cash cow, but for anyone who isn't a shareholder, who cares? I'm currently playing the new Dues Ex with the graphics cranked to their max. Somewhere, some poor console bastard is flailing about with his auto aim, fumbling with his inventory, suffering long load times, with graphics that looked dated 4 years ago on a machine that has specs that should have relegated it to someone's trash Linux box years ago.

There is one problem that i have with your statement going from battlefield 2 to bad company2. bad company 2 was a testbed for there engine for battlefield 3. without it battlefield 3 would be alot worse off. They can polish battlefield 3 because of the fact the engine has been polished. Just cause you dont like bc2 doesnt mean that it didnt help the gaming industry.

Ben's got the right idea,though if someone is lucky,he can get a nice cheap HDTV hooked up to the PC too...Or you can go my way and just build a FrankenHTPC and alternate between a 3 monitor Eyefinity rig and a 52'' HDTV (Btw, 24 cores and 256Gig RAM is relatively future-proof,right?)

what motherboard do you use that gives you 24cores and 256 gigs of RAM? or are you saying that's what you want?

I'm using the dual G34-socket KGPE-D16 (I got it off newegg)... Thankfully the 12-core Opterons + the RAM were from free from work,so the rig didn't exactly cost me an arm and a leg...Edit: Well,after my wife pretty much ordered me to get better video (like twin HD4870x2s were 'underpowered'), but those are the perils of marrying a techie ... Well,that and standing in line in the wee hours of the day for some dumb expansion to WoW,because someone used the preggo-card on me

That still doesn't change the fact that if you want to play the best and most bad ass games, the PC is still the king. Watching someone fawn over Halo... a frankly lack luster game, pretty much sums of the console Vs PC battle for me. Halo never made it big on the PC. They did port it over, but no one cared. Why? It just wasn't a good game. For the average PC user, Halo was nothing new. It featured the same a gimped version of multiplayer modes that PCs have had for a couple of decades, game play mechanics pioneered in the 90's, and laughably bland and dated graphics.

Argh, I only quoted this much, but the whole argument is a bunch of garbage. Halo didn't make it "big" on the PC because it had already been out for XBOX damn near 2 years.

Don't compare the PC to the Wii. That's just insane.

Finally, grow up and learn that not everyone on the planet likes using the PC for everything. Even people who love PC gaming. I personally prefer PC gaming for RPGs, adventure games, and MMO's but enjoy consoles for games like Assassins' Creed and Red Dead Revolver (possibly the best game I've played in several years). FPS's give me motion sickness, so I avoid them.

You guys do realize that it was ONE UK Form Manager (Shifty I think it was) who posted that From Dust would have one-time activation, right? No other official statement was released, or linked to. One person decided to run his mouth, Ubisoft corporate had nothing to do with that PR debacle.

While it sucks that the From Dust port was lackluster, I think Ben blew the whole thing out of proportion. After the shitstorm that Blizzard came under for the always-online DRM plans for Diablo 3 I don't think that I would have made an official statement either.

Don't forget that the numbers getting reported, those that say the PC game market is declining, they don't take into account digital sales. Digital sales are the fastest growing segment of the PC games market, I haven't purchased a physical retail copy of a game in the last two years. So don't think you can look at the NPD numbers and think you have any real idea of what PC numbers are.

If this is true, then no wonder. There is no place to buy PC games where I live. There USED to be, back when we had a Babbages. Then we kinda did when we had the EB games, but now we haven't since Gamestop bought out EB. Unless I want to buy WoW in BestBuy, there's literally nowhere to buy PC games where I live, so it's all digital for me.

Last game I physically bought? Um.... the original Guild Wars? I think?

Don't forget that the numbers getting reported, those that say the PC game market is declining, they don't take into account digital sales. Digital sales are the fastest growing segment of the PC games market, I haven't purchased a physical retail copy of a game in the last two years. So don't think you can look at the NPD numbers and think you have any real idea of what PC numbers are.

If this is true, then no wonder. There is no place to buy PC games where I live. There USED to be, back when we had a Babbages. Then we kinda did when we had the EB games, but now we haven't since Gamestop bought out EB. Unless I want to buy WoW in BestBuy, there's literally nowhere to buy PC games where I live, so it's all digital for me.

Last game I physically bought? Um.... the original Guild Wars? I think?

I'll pass on the Ubisoft hate rants. Other people can do them much better than me.

Instead, I'll ask a question no one else seems to be asking. Why in the world is Demiurge Studios releasing this through Ubisoft? This is a sidescrolling shooter. I'm sure it's fun, but I see nothing innovative or exciting about this. The graphics don't even seem that awesome, from the trailer. This is the kind of game that an indie studio releases via the download stores for $9.99, all the computer hipsters fall over themselves raving about how awesome it is, and it fades into obscurity as soon as the computer hipsters realize that there's only so much you can do with a sidescrolling shooter, and move on to the next awesome thing.

The trouble with that model is that the computer hipsters who would fall all over themselves are going to get severely turned off by a major game publisher's label on the game, especially Ubisoft. I'm sure this will be a fun game, but I agree with others that it won't gain much traction on the PC. Having Ubisoft involved only jacks up the price and results in less of the purchase money making it to the developer.

I bought the original Mass Effect on the PC when it came out, and before the patches it ran like wet garbage. I became a paranoid game saver because it would completely drop without warning. Most things I read blamed the DRM for the issues. It was a great way to play that game once it was working in a mostly stable fashion, but dear god that's not a good example if someone's trying to reassure me.

So is this the new norm? Instead of getting people's expectations up with titles like "Massive Awesome Man vs. The Womanizing Aliens of Doom", just lower them with ambiguous titles like "Shoot Many Robots".

What is this, Snakes on a Plane? Are they trying to make their game into a meme before it's released?